Roe v Wade

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      US states vote to protect reproductive rights in rebuke to anti-abortion push

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      US states vote to protect reproductive rights in rebuke to anti-abortion pushVermont, Michigan and California deliver blows to Republican agenda bent on dismantling the right to choose

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      Voters in multiple states passed measures to enshrine the right to abortion during Tuesday’s midterm elections, delivering a rebuke to the crackdown on reproductive freedoms taking place across the US.In Michigan, abortion rights campaigners declared victory on a ballot initiative looking to secure a constitutional right to abortion, meaning the state will now escape the imposition of a 1931 abortion ban that was on the books.JD Vance wins Ohio Senate race by wider margin than predictedRead moreThe state is the first in the US to fight off a pre-existing abortion ban with a ballot proposal, called Proposal 3, in a move that campaigners across the country see as a possible road map for other states.“Proposal 3’s passage marks an historic victory for abortion access in our state and in our country – and Michigan has paved the way for future efforts to restore the rights and protections of Roe v Wade nationwide,” Darci McConnell, the communication director for Reproductive Freedom For All, wrote in a statement, announcing the news after it was called by ABC and NBC.The news broke as other US states too saw victories for abortion rights initiatives.Vermont became the first state in America to protect abortion rights in its state constitution just before Michigan, calling their result on Tuesday after its voters resoundingly backed a ballot initiative by a huge margin. And in California, voters were on track to overwhelmingly pass a measure to enshrine into the state’s constitution the right to an abortion and contraception.“Vermont voters made history tonight,” said the Vermont for Reproductive Liberty Ballot Committee, which campaigned for the amendment, according to local news. All votes had not yet been counted at 11pm ET, but the yes campaign was leading by 77% to 22%.“Vermonters support reproductive freedom in all four corners of the state … and they believe that our reproductive decisions are ours to make without interference from politicians,” the committee said in a statement.In Vermont, the outcome was always expected, in a New England state so pro-choice that even the Republican governor backed Proposal 5. The proposal, brought by pro-choice advocates, means the constitution now determines that an “individual’s right to personal reproductive autonomy is central to the liberty and dignity to determine one’s own life course”.California’s Proposition 1, meanwhile, was positioned as a direct response to the US supreme court’s decision that overturned decades of established access and thrust the country into turmoil. Voter’s decisive support for Prop 1 will further enhance the state’s reputation as a haven for reproductive care just as restrictions – and political divisions – deepen across the country.The state’s governor, Gavin Newsom – who won re-election on Tuesday with a large majority – joined in the celebrations at a Prop 1 rally.Gavin Newsom speaking now at Proposition 1 rally, which is poised to pass by a huge margin to enshrine right to abortion in California constitution: “We affirmed we are a true freedom state.”— Ashley Zavala (@ZavalaA) November 9, 2022
      “Governor Newsom made it clear that he wants California to be visible as a haven for people seeking reproductive healthcare and Proposition 1 is part of that,” said constitutional law professor Cary Franklin, who also serves as Faculty Director of the Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy at the University of California Los Angeles. “It will get media attention and people will be made more aware that California is a place they can go.”The measure had been expected to easily pass, and analysts said support for reproductive rights could draw even more women and young people to the polls, which could play positively for Democrats in California’s conservative pockets.These wins deliver more blows for Republicans who are increasingly finding that, when put to a vote, Americans frequently do not agree with a sweeping agenda to dismantle abortion rights.So far, the anti-abortion movement has relied on judges, state houses and Republican lawmakers to curtail reproductive rights.But since the supreme court dismantled the constitutional right to abortion on 24 June, pro-choice advocates are increasingly looking to ballot initiatives as a way of shoring up rights. The anti-abortion movement suffered a huge blow over the summer when Kansas – a usually reliably red state – slammed down a proposal brought by the Republicans, looking to confirm there was no right to abortion in the state constitution.In Michigan the mood was already jubilant at the yes campaign’s watch party before they called the result, with voters screaming loudly, banging on tables and whooping in support of local voters, doctors and speakers from the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood.“My name is Nicholas, and I live in Ingham county,” one campaigner took to the stage to say. Speaking about him and his girlfriend, he added: “We knocked on over 1,500 doors and walked over a hundred miles, talking to neighbors who – like the rest of us here – agree this is a fundamental right,” to screams and cheers.Nicole Wells Stallworth, executive director at Planned Parenthood Advocates of Michigan later added: “We are living in a time like no other. The US supreme court did something they have never done: They reversed Roe. They tried it. And as such, we needed a campaign like none other. This campaign turned out to be just that.”TopicsAbortionUS midterm elections 2022US politicsVermontRoe v WadeCalifornianewsReuse this content More

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      The US made women second-class citizens. Now we must give a stinging rebuke | Moira Donegan

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      The US made women second-class citizens. Now we must give a stinging rebukeMoira DoneganThe supreme court edict overturning Roe v Wade said women are ‘not without electoral and political power’. That feels almost like a dare Organized feminism has been on the decline in the US since the 1980s, with the radicalism of the second wave giving way to a more diffuse, less focused feminist movement consisting of NGOs, campus activists, online discourse and HR inclusion initiatives. In a way, this is normal. Students of the movement have long spoken of feast and fallow years for feminism, eruptions of activism that are followed by long and virulent backlashes.But feminism has perhaps never received such a dramatic and immediate setback as it did this June. The supreme court’s decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization undid the major legal achievement of the second wave era, reversing Roe v Wade and ending the constitutional right to an abortion.The result has been chaos, with so-called “trigger bans” blasting into enforcement in some states, long-dormant laws from before the era of women’s suffrage being revived in others and still other states left in limbo, as abortion flickers in and out of legality, depending on the proclivities of whichever judge is determining whichever injunction. Children and teens who are pregnant as a result of incest, rape or exploitation are now forced to travel across state lines for abortions, because they live in states where a fetus or embryo is valued more highly than their own health and potential. Women whose pregnancies are doomed are forced to wait, carrying fetuses they know will not live, or to slowly bleed out their miscarriages until either the fetus dies or they go septic.There’s an incalculable amount of cruelty now being forced on pregnant women, and there’s also an insidious kind of debasement being imposed on all women, pregnant or not. Millions of American women and trans people are now living in states where their lives are not their own, where an unplanned pregnancy can derail their educations, careers or plans, where they must live under the indignity of the knowledge that the state can compel them to give birth. That injury is not the kind of acute horror story that we see coming out of states where bans are now in effect. But it is an injury that has been done to each and every woman in America.This indignity is political. For the past five decades, during the Roe era, American women were endowed with a basic level of respect by the right to abortion. They could not be forced to carry a pregnancy to term; their bodies, at least on paper, were their own. This principle lent women a sense of worth and equality under the law, the sense that the freedoms and responsibilities of self-determination and self-respect – of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – so revered in the American tradition were theirs, too. The idea was that women were made, by Roe, into full citizens – not members of some lesser class needing monitoring or protection, but equal participants in the American project.This idea was so powerful and potent to American women’s identity that it did not matter what the reality of Roe was. It did not matter that the decision itself was built on legal reasoning about a right to privacy, instead of a more secure, more honest reasoning about equality; it did not matter that the supreme court had never recognized American women as having their own individual right to reject pregnancy. Over the 49 years of its existence, Roe became more than just the 1973 court decision and its logic. It became a symbol, a shorthand for the baseline preconditions of women’s full citizenship.Dobbs erased both the law and the symbol. Women no longer have a constitutional right to an abortion, and we no longer have the dignity that that right gave us. We are now, in many states, subject to laws that criminalize and surveil us, that assess our needs for medical care based on whether we are suffering enough to deserve it, that in many cases treat blobs of tissue, laughably far from anything human, as having rights and interests that trump our own. In one of the most intimate and life-defining aspects of our existence, we find ourselves not quite treated as adults, not allowed to make our own choices, not trusted to know our own interests and not valued in our own right. In pregnancy, women are now less citizens than they are subjects.In his majority opinion ending the constitutional right to abortion, Samuel Alito asserts that he’s not hurting women on the basis of their sex at all, that he is merely handing the issue “back to the states”, as if any state law banning or restricting abortion did not inherently make women less equal. But Alito asserted that women who did not like the Dobbs decision could simply vote to reverse its effects in their own states, and hope that a majority of other voters agreed with them that they should be full citizens with self-determination. “Women are not without electoral or political power,” Alito said, perhaps somewhat regretfully. If they didn’t like the status of second-class citizenship to which his ruling had consigned them, why didn’t they simply vote themselves out of it? Maybe we will. During the midterm elections, American women can vote en masse to restore reproductive freedom.Of course, voting will not be sufficient to restore abortion rights and women’s full citizenship in America. For that, we will need a revival of an organized and radical feminist movement, committed to local engagement, long-term relationship – and institution-building and direct action. The seeds of that movement are already beginning to germinate in the local abortion funds, clandestine mutual-aid efforts and grassroots mobilizations that have helped fill the well of need in the wake of Dobbs. And of course, voting is not easy for everyone – it has been made less easy, and less meaningful, by the actions of the same supreme court.But the midterm elections represent an immediate opportunity for American women to exercise that political power of which Alito spoke. The elections can preserve Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, which can stave off Republican ambitions to ban abortion nationwide; if the majorities are large enough, they may even be able to fulfill Joe Biden’s promise to reinstate Roe by statute. Voting for Democratic governors, attorneys general and state legislators can blunt or reverse the impact of state abortion bans and misogynist laws: a local election, for many women voters, means a choice between a district attorney who will prosecute patients and providers of abortions, and one who will not.Alito’s whole opinion drips with contempt, but the line about American women – that we are “not without electoral and political power” – felt like a dare. American women do have power, perhaps more than Samuel Alito realizes. It’s time to call his bluff.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
      TopicsUS politicsOpinionAbortionWomenRoe v WadeUS supreme courtLaw (US)HealthcommentReuse this content More

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      A Young American Woman Loses Faith After Dobbs Ruling

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      The Fair Observer website uses digital cookies so it can collect statistics on how many visitors come to the site, what content is viewed and for how long, and the general location of the computer network of the visitor. These statistics are collected and processed using the Google Analytics service. Fair Observer uses these aggregate statistics from website visits to help improve the content of the website and to provide regular reports to our current and future donors and funding organizations. The type of digital cookie information collected during your visit and any derived data cannot be used or combined with other information to personally identify you. Fair Observer does not use personal data collected from its website for advertising purposes or to market to you.As a convenience to you, Fair Observer provides buttons that link to popular social media sites, called social sharing buttons, to help you share Fair Observer content and your comments and opinions about it on these social media sites. These social sharing buttons are provided by and are part of these social media sites. They may collect and use personal data as described in their respective policies. Fair Observer does not receive personal data from your use of these social sharing buttons. It is not necessary that you use these buttons to read Fair Observer content or to share on social media. More

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      Ohio’s partisan supreme court election could decide abortion’s future in state

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      AnalysisOhio’s partisan supreme court election could decide abortion’s future in statePoppy NoorThe midterms include key elections to the state’s highest court as the judicial system becomes increasingly politicized In Ohio, a highly partisan fight over three state supreme court seats could determine the political direction of the court on a slew of important issues – particularly abortion.With the US supreme court increasingly handing issues such as voting rights, abortion, gun rights and gerrymandering back to the states, state supreme court races are becoming more important than ever.Abortion on the ballot: here are the US states voting on a woman’s right to chooseRead moreFew states illustrate how political these courts are becoming better than Ohio, where justices’ party affiliation will be listed on the ballot for the first time in the 8 November election, and where the justices on that court will soon determine the fate of the state’s six-week abortion ban that has been blocked and unblocked by lower courts since Roe v Wade was overturned early in the summer. Abortion is currently legal in the state up to 22 weeks, as the ban is being litigated.As a result of the stakes, more cash is also pouring into state supreme court races around the country from political action committees associated with the national parties. Fair Courts America, a Pac associated with the Republican party, has pledged $22.5m for state supreme court races this election cycle, to support conservative judicial candidates in Kentucky, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas.In Kentucky, that same Pac has donated $1.6m to three conservative judges vying for election. One of those judges, Joe Fischer, is a former Republican congressman who was the key sponsor of the state’s trigger ban on abortion that went into effect when Roe was overturned, as well as an anti-abortion referendum that’s being put to Kentucky voters next week.“People used to spend all their time looking at the federal constitution for protections, particularly when it came to individual rights. But now the US supreme court is basically saying these matters are better left resolved in the state courts and their state constitutions,” explains Bill Weisenberg, a former assistant executive director of the Ohio State Bar Association.In Ohio, after Roe fell, ending the federal constitutional right to abortion, the state implemented a ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. That ban is currently being blocked by a lower state court, but ultimately, it will land with the state supreme court. And the election of certain justices will be pivotal in determining the future of the ban.The seven-justice Ohio supreme court currently has four Republican justices and three Democratic justices. The current chief justice, Maureen O’Connor, a Republican, is not seeking re-election this year because of age limits, so two other sitting justices, Republican Sharon Kennedy and Democrat Jennifer Brunner, will battle it out to replace her in the top spot. Two incumbent Republican justices, Pat DeWine and Pat Fischer will face Democratic challengers Marilyn Zayas and Terri Jamison, for seats on the court.O’Connor, the chief justice who is standing down, was a Republican-affiliated judge who was happy to break with the party line on issues such as gerrymandering. She has never openly indicated where she stands on abortion.But all three Republican justices up for election on Tuesday have stated on candidate surveys that they believe there is no constitutional right to abortion, according to local news, meaning their elections could strike a fatal blow to abortion rights in Ohio.They also came under fire in September for attending a Trump rally where the former president repeated baseless claims about the 2020 election being stolen, and for subsequently refusing to confirm that the results of the 2020 election were valid. One of those justices – Pat DeWine – is also under scrutiny for having liked a tweet promoting a conspiracy theory about the violent attack on the husband of the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, asking “what are they hiding?” He has since said he clicked “like” inadvertently.Meanwhile, Zayas, Jamison and Brunner have publicly stated that they believe the Ohio constitution protects the right to abortion.Weisenberg cautions that neither political affiliation, nor what a justice indicates of their views before their election, are watertight indicators for how they will rule once they are on the supreme court. “People are surprised sometimes when they read the opinion and it’s not in keeping with where they thought the justice would lean, or what they had said on a prior occasion,” he said.Indeed, the US supreme court justices Brett Kavanaugh and Samuel Alito indicated they believed the constitutional right to abortion was settled precedent before being confirmed to the court.TopicsOhioAbortionReproductive rightsRoe v WadeUS justice systemUS midterm elections 2022US politicsanalysisReuse this content More

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      Abortion might help Democrats in the midterms in two major ways | Laurel Elder, Steve Greene and Mary-Kate Lizotte

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      Abortion might help Democrats in the midterms in two major waysLaurel Elder, Steve Greene and Mary-Kate LizotteIf young pro-choice voters turn out in higher numbers than forecast models are expecting, it could provide a bounce to Democrats in key races Political science-based forecasting models offer a clear prediction for the 2022 midterm elections – the results will be very bad for Democrats. Based solely on the fundamentals like the state of the economy, the type of election (ie midterm) and having an unpopular Democrat in the White House, a model by political scientists Charles Tien and Michael Lewis-Beck, generated months before 8 November, predicts a 44-seat loss for Democrats in the House and a five-seat loss for Democrats in the Senate.The forecasting models produced by FiveThirtyEight are not quite as grim about the prospects for Democrats, predicting that the party will most likely lose majority control of the House of Representatives, but have a small (and shrinking) edge in holding on to their minuscule advantage in the Senate. Unlike the political science models, FiveThirtyEight’s predictions also incorporate polling data and therefore pick up on the ground-level reality that Republicans have put forth weak candidates in key races.Abortion is a bread-and-butter economic issue. We need to treat it that way | Rebecca SolnitRead moreBut there is a plausible case to be made that even models incorporating polling data are underestimating Democratic strength in the 2022 midterms. The issue of abortion may help Democrats in two important ways that are not being picked up in either of the models discussed above.Predicting the outcome of elections is considerably more difficult than other types of polling (eg issue polling), as it requires making assumptions about who is actually going to turn out to vote. Among these well-founded assumptions is that young people have the lowest turnout of all age groups – especially so in midterm elections. Thus current likely voter models assume that young people will once again underperform as voters in 2022.For those who have interacted with young women recently – the anger about the Dobbs decision is undeniable. Outrage at the idea that “old white men” are making decisions about their bodies has made abortion a priority for young women. A recent poll of Gen Z Americans in swing states supports this, providing empirical evidence that young people are energized to vote and continue to rank abortion as their top issue, even while the issue has slipped in importance for older Americans. Young people’s passion on issues has failed to translate into actual action in the voting booth in the past; however, if young pro-choice women actually do turn out in higher numbers than forecasting models are expecting, this could provide a multi-point bounce to Democratic candidates in key House and Senate races.Additionally in our research we found there are a lot of cross-pressured Republicans on the question of abortion legality. While there are a small number of Democrats who hold positions on abortion in tension with their party – eg less than 10% approve the overturning of Roe v Wade – the percentage of Republicans uncomfortable with their party’s policies on abortion reaches anywhere from 30-50%. When abortion policy was more or less settled law, it was easy for cross-pressured Republicans to ignore the conflict between their party’s position and their own, but now that Republicans are enacting highly restrictive laws and outright abortion bans, such contradictions will be harder to ignore. How will cross-pressured Republicans respond?The Kansas referendum over the summer suggests that the threat of abortion bans has the power to mobilize low-propensity voters and entice cross-pressured Republicans to abandon their party’s position. Voting for a Democratic candidate, however, is not as likely as voting in disagreement with one’s party on a referendum, especially in today’s polarized climate. The more likely possibility is that at least some cross-pressured Republicans may simply opt out of the electoral process.Losing the House and especially the Senate would be a major political blow for the Democrats with important and lasting policy consequences, but should that happen, the impact of the Dobbs decision will likely have staved off much larger losses. And should the Democrats defy historical odds and hold on to the House, or, more likely, the Senate, they will almost surely have the Dobbs decision to thank and its ability to mobilize young voters and to demobilize cross-pressured Republicans.
      Laurel Elder is a professor of political science at Hartwick College
      Steven Greene is a professor of political science at North Carolina State University
      Mary-Kate Lizotte is a professor of political science at Augusta University
      TopicsUS midterm elections 2022OpinionAbortionRoe v WadeUS politicsRepublicansDemocratscommentReuse this content More

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      ‘I’m changing Congress’: how Cori Bush brought her lived experience to Capitol Hill

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      Interview‘I’m changing Congress’: how Cori Bush brought her lived experience to Capitol HillDavid Smith in Washington Member of ‘the Squad’ on how her abortion experience, sexual assault and front-line fight in Ferguson, Missouri, affected her politicsHer new memoir is bracingly, sometimes painfully honest, but there is one passage that Cori Bush seriously considered striking out before publication.She had an abortion when she was 19. Walking into the white-walled room of a reproductive health clinic, Bush writes, she began to have reservations about the procedure. Twice she told a nurse, “I don’t want to do this,” but twice the nurse ignored her objections and carried on.Bush heard “the awful sounds as the vacuum sucked the fetus out of my body … I remember the intense pain and the feeling of helplessness in that moment. I was furious. That doctor ignored my pleas. I was just another person in his assembly line, just another little Black girl.”The doctors leaving anti-abortion states: ‘I couldn’t do my job at all’Read moreAs the prologue observes, The Forerunner is not your typical political memoir. Bush, 46, is not your typical politician. She is a registered nurse, ordained pastor, community activist and organiser and single mother. A Democrat from St Louis, she is the first Black woman to represent Missouri in the US Congress. She is also a survivor and embodiment of resilience.She realises that her frank recollection of abortion as a traumatic experience is politically loaded and could be seized upon by anti-abortion activists to further their cause. It comes just a month before midterm elections in which Democrats hope to tap into public anger over the supreme court’s decision to torch the constitutional right to abortion.“I know that many supporters of reproductive rights will be outraged by my decision to share this story,” the congresswoman writes.Yet in a phone interview, she tells the Guardian she has no regrets about including it. “It was a difficult position but this memoir is me telling my story,” she says. “To silence me, to tell me you shouldn’t tell this story because someone else can use it and weaponise it, that’s not an answer. We’ve got to fix the problem. The way to make sure that the problem is highlighted and awareness is placed on the issue is to talk about it.”While the abortion debate is often oversimplified, Bush is offering a reminder of the messy, nuanced reality that she faced as a young Black woman restrained by white medical providers. She continues: “Speaking about what happened wasn’t to condemn abortion providers at all because I work closely with a bunch of providers and reproductive health clinics and I support them.“It’s something that should not have happened to me and it is our work to not only fix certain parts of the system of harm; it is to do the work to fix all of it. But as I also wrote in my book, I was still able to have the services that I needed and the decision was mine to make. In the end, I made the right decision for me.”On the day in June that the supreme court’s rightwing majority overturned its 1973 Roe v Wade ruling, Bush happened to be back at the same clinic where she had undergone that difficult abortion (along with a previous abortion that resulted from a rape when she was 17). The congresswoman was meeting with providers, advocates and the health secretary, Xavier Becerra, when the news came through.“My chief of staff walked up to me during the conversation and showed me his phone and I couldn’t believe it at first. I kept blinking and looking at his phone. Even though we knew that it was most likely going to come any day, it was still hard to see and for that reality to set in.“Someone said it out loud and stopped the conversation: ‘The supreme court just overturned Roe.’ We all embraced one another. I shed tears, I yelled, I hollered out because I was thinking about the millions of people across this country that will be affected by this.”The court’s decision led to a surge of women registering to vote in some states. In Missouri’s neighbour Kansas, people voted overwhelmingly to continue to protect abortion in the state constitution. But recent midterm opinion polls suggest that Democratic anger over Roe v Wade could be eclipsed by Republican concerns over inflation and crime.Bush insists, however: “It’s a huge motivator because we have to remember that this is something that had been in place since 1973 – this was in place when I was born. There are a lot of us that only know a Roe v Wade society and there are people who may not agree with abortion but they also don’t agree with their rights being stripped away. Those folks are saying that’s going to make me show up to vote for the Democrat because I don’t want my rights being taken away.”Bush brings lived experience to Capitol Hill in ways unthinkable for a career politician. Having been evicted from her home several times, forcing her to sleep in her car with her children, last year she slept on the steps of the US Capitol in protest after Congress failed to pass legislation to extend an eviction moratorium (the White House eventually issued a new eviction moratorium).In 2014 she was on the frontlines of the uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, after the police killing of unarmed Black teenager Michael Brown. This made her a target for harassment. Her tyres were slashed while her car was parked in front of the complex where she lived. She came home and found her front door had been tampered with.Bush needed to move home. In 2016, a few weeks after losing a Democratic primary election for the Senate, she saw a social media post by a local faith healer advertising a house to rent. When she got in touch and went to see it, the man raped her. She describes the assault in unflinching, unforgiving detail and writes: “I whimpered through the pain. It seemed like forever. I felt like dying. I wanted to die.”Bush explains by phone why she choose to open her memoir with this candid account: “That changed everything and I am still in therapy now. I’m still walking out that journey to healing. It affected my life the way that it did because, when I thought about the sexual assaults I had back when I was 18, early adult, I went for the next 20 years blaming myself, like it was because my shorts were really short or my shirt was low or where I was when I met the person. I carried that for all of those years.“This time I had just completed my first run for office and lost; I was grieving that but I was a registered nurse now, I was taking care of two kids, I had just come from work, I was in my scrubs uniform, I was going to a place to see a home. That’s what really rocked me. Before, I thought it was because of something I did; I didn’t do any of those things this time; I wasn’t drinking, any of it.“So that’s why the book had to start with that, because my life turned upside down but, as I’m working through it, I’ve been able to help so many others and so many others have also helped me to be able to move forward.”Can Democrats win tight midterm races with a pro-choice message? Pat Ryan says yesRead moreAfter the rape, Bush was horrified by the lack of discretion she was afforded. She tells how “a caravan” of people followed her to hospital and she was subjected to the humiliation of a rape kit. A forensic exam found that the encounter could have been an assault or, as the rapist had claimed, consensual rough sex. Bush went to court four times to get a protection order against the faith healer but repeatedly lost.As a Christian, has she been able to forgive the man who raped her? She pauses. “Let me just say I have some forgiveness but is there a blanket all-is-forgiven? I’m still working through that. I’ve always believed that forgiveness is for you, not for the other person, and so usually I’m quick to forgive.“But in this instance, because there was some trust there and he hurt me the way that he hurt me and then he lied as a man of God and preacher of the gospel, and he continues on in this lie and continues to evade the system, that has made it difficult for me to just be like, yes, I forgive him and I’m going on with my life.”The Forerunner also gives Bush’s insider account of joining thousands of activists on the streets in response to the 2014 shooting of Brown in Ferguson. She recalls how the skin on her face and arms burned after police fired teargas. The uprising went on for more than 400 days and, Bush argues, became a pivot point in the centuries-long struggle for Black liberation.It also foreshadowed the nationwide protests for racial justice that followed the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. But calls from Bush and others to “defund the police” met with a predictable backlash, even from Joe Biden and other Democratic leaders. Some fear that the momentum of Black Lives Matter is again being lost.But Bush contends that the working and the organising goes on: “Even if we’re not on the streets every single day chanting and marching, are we organising folks to get them to the polls? Are we organising groups to be able to teach people what to do if you get pulled over by the police? Are we organising groups to teach white people how to talk about and understand racism? Are we mobilising people to support our immigrant community if they’re under attack? Are we organising for repro rights?”She accuses Republicans of wilfully distorting the central idea of defund the police, which means reallocating funding away from police departments to mental health workers, social workers and other government agencies. “They would rather scare their people instead of educating them.”Bush became a leader of the movement seeking police and criminal justice reform in Ferguson and across the St Louis area. She lost a Democratic primary race for a congressional seat in 2018 but, with the backing of progressive group Justice Democrats, prevailed in 2020 over a 20-year incumbent. She was instantly embraced as a member of “the squad” in the House of Representatives; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez describes her as a “sister-in-service”.There have been wins and losses under Biden, a longtime moderate. The president declared racial equity a central plank of his agenda, appointed a diverse cabinet and far outpaced his predecessors in nominating women and people of colour to the federal bench. But legislation on police reform and voting rights stalled in a Congress where Democrats command only narrow majorities. Bush regards the glass as half full.“Joe Biden has absolutely surprised me,” she says, citing his decisions to commute the sentences of 75 people serving time for nonviolent drug offences, cancel billions of dollars in student loan debt and lift a pandemic-related expulsion policy that effectively closed America’s asylum system at its border with Mexico.Many idealists have arrived in Washington only to find their dreams crushed by compromise. Is Bush changing Congress or is Congress changing her? She laughs. “Congress is changing me a little bit in the way of helping me to see how, by pushing, our government can work for the regular everyday person. Not understanding the inner workings of Congress before, I wasn’t able to see it but I knew that I needed to go inside of it to push for the change I wanted to see.“But mostly I’m changing Congress because I’ve been there less than two years and we have been able to bring about some change and, if nothing else, my colleagues know where I stand on issues. They don’t have to wonder what’s going to happen if a policing bill comes forward, if we talk about Israel-Palestine, if they relate to equity and inclusion, anything that has to do with incarceration rates. There is no question. People know that I stand on the side of equity and equality.”TopicsCori BushUS politicsUS midterm elections 2022Biden administrationAbortionRoe v WadeinterviewsReuse this content More

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      Samuel Alito assured Ted Kennedy in 2005 of respect for Roe, diary reveals

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      Samuel Alito assured Ted Kennedy in 2005 of respect for Roe, diary revealsExcerpts reported by biographer show Alito, who wrote June ruling that outlawed abortion, said he was ‘big believer in precedents’ In a private meeting in 2005, Samuel Alito, who would become the US supreme court justice who wrote the ruling removing the federal right to abortion, assured Ted Kennedy of his respect for Roe v Wade, the landmark 1973 court decision which made the procedure legal in the US.“I am a believer in precedents,” Alito said, according to diary excerpts reported by the Massachusetts senator’s biographer, John A Farrell, on Monday. “People would find I adhere to that.”Alito and Kennedy met regarding Alito’s nomination by George W Bush. The nominee also said: “I recognise there is a right to privacy. I think it’s settled.”Seventeen years later, in his ruling removing the right to abortion, via the Mississippi case Dobbs v Jackson, Alito said the entitlement had wrongly been held to be protected as part of the right to privacy.“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” he wrote this June.The late Kennedy, a younger brother of US president John F Kennedy, who spent 47 years in the Senate, also questioned Alito about a memo he wrote as a justice department clerk in 1985, outlining his opposition to Roe. Alito told Kennedy he had been trying to impress his bosses.“I was a younger person,” Alito said. “I’ve matured a lot.”According to Farrell, Alito told Kennedy his views on abortion were “personal” but said: “I’ve got constitutional responsibilities and those are going to be the determining views”.Alito was confirmed to the supreme court by the senate, 58 votes to 42. Kennedy voted no.Farrell reported the excerpts from Kennedy’s diary in the New York Times. A spokesperson for Alito “said he had no comment on the conversation”.Kennedy died in 2009, aged 77. His Senate seat was filled by a Republican, Scott Brown, who was subsequently defeated by Elizabeth Warren, who quickly emerged as a leading progressive. In June, after Alito’s ruling removed the right to abortion, Warren was a leading voice of liberal anger.“After decades of scheming,” she said, “Republican politicians have finally forced their unpopular agenda on the rest of America.”01:54Susan Collins, a Maine Republican but a supporter of abortion rights, said she had been misled in a meeting similar to that between Kennedy and Alito.Collins said that in the 2018 meeting, when asked about Roe, Brett Kavanaugh told her to “start with my record, my respect for precedent, my belief that it is rooted in the constitution and my commitment to the rule of law” and added: “I understand precedent and I understand the importance of overturning it.”In 2022, Kavanaugh sided with Alito and three other conservatives in removing the right to abortion.Collins said: “I feel misled.”Discussing Alito’s meeting with Kennedy, Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor and legal ethics specialist, told the Times: “No serious court watcher can doubt that what Alito said in Dobbs he deeply believed in 2005. And long before then.”Farrell’s previous books include a biography of Richard Nixon. On Monday, reviewing Ted Kennedy: A Life, the Associated Press wrote: “Teddy lived long enough for his flaws to be fully exposed. All are laid bare in this book – the drinking, the infidelity, the selfishness, the casual cruelty, the emotional isolation.“The central riddle of Kennedy is how these weaknesses existed alongside the benevolence, loyalty, perseverance and wisdom that made him one of the most influential senators in modern American history.”The AP review noted Kennedy’s silence during another supreme court nomination, that of Clarence Thomas in 1991, writing: “When Anita Hill accused Thomas of sexual harassment, Kennedy was in no position to help lead the fight against him. He passed his time at the confirmation hearings by doodling sailboats, and Thomas was confirmed.”In June this year, Thomas joined with Alito to overturn Roe v Wade. In a concurring opinion, he suggested other privacy based rights could be next, including the rights to contraception and same-sex marriage.TopicsRoe v WadeAbortionUS supreme courtUS constitution and civil libertiesLaw (US)US politicsEdward KennedynewsReuse this content More

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      Democrats’ midterms hurdle: Americans are getting used to eroded democracy | Jill Filipovic

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      Democrats’ midterms hurdle: Americans are getting used to eroded democracyJill FilipovicWhile a whopping 71% of voters said that American democracy is at risk, just 7% named it as the most important issue in this election This much is clear: Democrats are in trouble in the midterms. After an initial bump from the widespread outrage at an extremist supreme court that stripped American women of our nationwide right to safe, legal abortion, voters are recalibrating, and falling into a familiar midterm routine: supporting the opposition party. Republicans, according to new polling, are leading with voters nationwide, and especially in a handful of crucial state races that will determine control of Congress.But there’s something bigger going on here than just the usual political churn, or even the idea that voters are more motivated by pocketbook issues than amorphous ones like a potential future need for abortion. Voters are adapting to authoritarianism. And that doesn’t just portend a bad outcome for Democrats in November; it suggests America’s democratic future is at acute risk.The American reaction to the supreme court’s radical decision on abortion rights is a telling hint of what’s to come. The court summarily taking away a fundamental, long-held, and oft-utilized civil right is incredibly uncommon; it hasn’t happened in my lifetime, or my mother’s lifetime. While most of the rest of the world is moving toward broader respect for human rights, including women’s rights, and expanding abortion alongside a greater embrace of democratic norms, the US is in league with only a tiny handful of nations in making abortions harder to get, and in newly criminalizing them. The nations that are cracking down on abortion rather than expanding abortion rights have one thing in common: a turn from democracy and toward authoritarian governance.When the court overturned Roe v Wade, many Americans were initially incensed. Women registered to vote in astounding numbers. Significant majorities of Americans told pollsters that the court’s decision was flat-out wrong. The legitimacy of the court took such a huge hit that several of its justices made defensive statements about the value of their increasingly devalued institution. Pollsters noted a sharp turn: after dire predictions for Democrats, the party suddenly had an edge, thanks to an overreaching conservative court.And Republicans were set back on their heels. The Dobbs decision was the result of decades of rightwing work and millions of dollars. The Republican party has made overturning Roe a singular goal. So it was interesting to see how they reacted when they finally got what they had always wanted: they went quiet. They avoided the topic. The standard Republican view on abortion – that it should be illegal nationwide – is overwhelmingly unpopular, so Republican politicians spent the summer and early fall trying to change the subject.So what, then, explains this sharp swing back to Republican favorability?Simply put, voters acclimated. The media is still covering the impact of rightwing anti-abortion laws, but not with the overwhelming force we saw in the initial weeks after Roe fell. After all, at some point the litany of horror stories – of women being refused care for miscarriages, of women being forced to carry doomed pregnancies to term, of women traveling thousands of miles for basic health care, of women getting septic infections, of women losing their uteruses, of child rape victims being forced into motherhood – blend into each other, sound like the same story over again, and become old news.Human beings are remarkably adaptable. Often, this serves us well: it means we survive, even through horrifying circumstances. But it also means that we can learn to live in horrifying circumstances. Terrible laws that don’t affect most of us every day simply fade into the background as life ticks on. Terrible governments rarely target majorities of the population immediately and all at once. Instead, authoritarian states tend to start with those who have little power, as well as those who threaten the authoritarian’s power. For many conservative, highly religious authoritarian states, women are both a group with less economic power and political representation and a chief threat.In the US, the women primarily hurt by Dobbs are those living in conservative states, and women with the fewest resources are hit hardest of all. This is not an accident. While all women in the US now live without full rights to our own bodies, and while the anti-abortion movement is coming for all of us, conservative politicians have targeted women with the least economic and political power first. A majority of American women may be angry about anti-abortion laws, but are not yet (or do not yet believe themselves to be) directly affected by them, and that is especially true for the Americans who have the greatest influence in the political and economic spheres – women and men alike.The stripping of abortion rights is one clear indicator of America’s rising authoritarianism. And Americans know that we’re in trouble. Voters – especially Democratic and independent voters – are aware that democracy is under threat, and perhaps even that trust in free and fair elections, women’s rights, and America’s democratic institutions are on the ballot this November. While a whopping 71% of voters said that American democracy is at risk, however, just 7% named it as the most important issue in this election.And that’s perhaps understandable. “Democracy” can feel like a big and nebulous thing, while a more expensive grocery bill is a tangible and immediate concern. And Democrats have been telling voters (correctly) that democracy has been at risk since Donald Trump began undermining it. They weren’t wrong to sound the alarm. But eventually even the loudest siren begins to sound like background noise.There is also the simple fact that threats to American democracy will not be solved in 2022 alone.What the US is experiencing is a pervasive problem with rising authoritarianism all over the world. Often, autocrats use democratic means to rise to power, and their takeover is a slow one, not an overnight coup. And once authoritarianism is entrenched, average citizens carry on – there may be an initial shock, but then life, for many people, evolves into a new normal.We’re seeing this dynamic now when it comes to abortion. Over the next few years, we may see it on an even larger scale, and with democracy itself.Armed with this new data, pundits, consultants and politicians themselves are telling Democrats to revamp their strategy: don’t focus on abortion so much, or focus on the economy more, or simply be prepared to lose in November. The beltway consensus seems to be that this is a messaging problem.And certainly Democratic messaging could be better. But what we’re seeing isn’t just a problem of inadequate sloganeering or a focus on the wrong things. It’s another iteration of a longstanding pattern, forged by a combination of human nature and the canniness (and historical learnedness) of those who seek to use democratic processes for undemocratic aims.How do you convince the frog in the slow-boiling pot not only that he’s in real danger, but that it’s going to take a while for the heat to come down? That’s not a question Democrats can answer with messaging alone – and not one they’re going to solve in a month.
      Jill Filipovic is the author of the The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness
      TopicsUS politicsOpinionRepublicansDemocratsAbortionRoe v WadeUS supreme courtcommentReuse this content More